Open taxonomy

Towards an Open Taxonomy

@rdmpage

http://iphylo.blogspot.com

Anchoring Biodiversity Information:From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond

4 million articles

35 years in jail

$US 1M fine

Greg Maxwell

“I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading.”

Information wants to be free

Information wants to be expensive

http://www.organismnames.com

www.theplantlist.org

You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/theplantlist

The top-ten new species described in 2010 and the failure of taxonomy to embrace Open Access publication

http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-ten-new-species-described-in-2010.html

Taxonomy is not open

Taxonomy is not (really) digital

Taxonomic databases are digitised 5 × 3 index cards

Catalogue of Life

Endacusta pindana

What would Google do?

What would Charles Sherborn do if he was 19 and worked at Google?

name

name

What is a taxonomic name?

Let’s ask a taxonomist…

homonyms

taxonomicconcepts

publication date

plenarypowers

basionym

spec

ies

conc

ept

typification nomen nudum

trinomial

codecompliant

lexical variant

valid

…on second thoughts, let’s not.

name

Taxonomy is not linked

Literature online

Museums, universities,and scientific societies

Digital archives

Commercialpublishers

http://iphyo.org/~rpage/afd

Publication links

• 25,554 publications

• 32% have digital identifier (BHL, DOI, URL)

• 20% in BioStor

• 10% have DOIs

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/zoobank

Geothelphusa marmorata

http://www.organismnames.com

http://www.organismnames.com

ION LSID XML

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

14% of names linked to a bibliographic identifier

DOI 105,947BioStor 40,300Handle 19,325URL 24,680JSTOR 19,032PDF 32,069CiNii 5,457Any identifier 214,049

Names 1,491,137

I want a taxonomy that is

•Open

•Digital

• Linked

Show me the name

Linking to data

Publishing platform

The spider family Selenopidae (Arachnida, Araneae) in Australasia and the Oriental Region

All links go elsewhere

http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

All links are internal

Taxonomic database becomes a platform for taxonomic publishing